Approaches to Culture in Mainstream Social Psychology and in Early Cross-Cultural Psychology 33(Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Evidence that individuals from differ-
ent cultural backgrounds maintain contrasting systems of
belief, value, or meaning—and that they interpret situations in
contrasting ways—tends to be assimilated to an individual-
difference dimension. It is viewed as implying that individual
differences in attitudes, understandings, or available informa-
tion may relate to cultural group membership, but not as
implying that there is a need to give any independent weight to
cultural meanings and practices per se in explanation.
In maintaining the present realist approach to situations
and in adopting explanatory frameworks focused on factors in
the situation and in the person, cultural considerations are
downplayed in theoretical importance. It is assumed that cul-
tural information may substitute for or shortcut individual in-
formation processing: The individual comes to learn about
the world indirectly through acquiring the knowledge dissem-
inated in the culture. As such, culture is viewed as providing
information redundant with that which individuals could ob-
tain by themselves through direct cognitive processing. Wells
(1981), for example, maintains that enculturation processes
are nonessential to individual knowledge acquisition:
It is difficult for anyone who has raised a child to deny the per-
vasive influence of socialized processing that surely surfaces as
causal schemata originate through secondary sources such as
parents...Even though socialized processing may be an impor-
tant determinant of knowledge about causal forces at one level, it
nevertheless begs the question. How is it that the parents knew
an answer? The issue is circular. That is precisely the reason that
one must consider a more basic factor–namely original process-
ing. (p. 313)From the present type of perspective, cultural knowledge is
seen as necessary neither to account for the nature of individ-
ual knowledge nor to evaluate its adequacy.
Natural Science Ideals of Explanation
The tendency to downplay the importance of culture in social
psychological theory also derives from the field’s embrace
of an idealized physical-science model of explanation. Al-
though social psychology makes use of multiple normative
models of scientific inquiry, it has typically treated physical
science models of scientific inquiry as the ideal approach.
This has affected both the goals and methods of inquiry in
ways that have tended to marginalize cultural approaches.
In terms of explanatory goals, the foremost aim of psycho-
logical explanation has been to identify universal laws of
behavior. Adopting the criteria of parsimony and of predic-
tive power as the hallmarks of a successful explanation,
psychological inquiry has been conceptualized as involving
the identification of deep structural explanatory mechanisms
that (it is assumed) underlie overt behavior. Higgins and
Kruglanski (1996) outline this vision for social psychological
inquiry:A discovery of lawful principles governing a realm of phenom-
ena is a fundamental objective of scientific research...Auseful
scientific analysis needs to probe beneath the surface. In other
words, it needs to get away from the ‘phenotypic’ manifestations
and strive to unearth the ‘genotypes’ that may lurk beneath....
We believe in the scientific pursuit of the nonobvious. But less in
the sense of uncovering new and surprising phenomena than
in the sense of probing beneath surface similarities and differ-
ences to discover deep underlying structures. (p. vii)From this perspective, the assumption is made that funda-
mental psychological processes are timeless, ahistorical, and
culturally invariant, with the principles of explanation in the
social sciences no different from those in the natural or phys-
ical sciences.
From the present physical-science view of explanation,
cultural considerations tend to be regarded as noise; they are
consequently held constant in order to focus on identifying
underlying processes. Malpass (1988) articulates this type of
position:Cultural differences are trivial because they are at the wrong
level of abstraction, and stand as ‘medium’ rather than ‘thing’ in
relation to the objects of study. The readily observable differ-
ences among cultural groups are probably superficial, and repre-
sent little if any differences at the level of psychological
processes. (p. 31)According to this perspective, an explanation that identifies a
process as dependent on culturally specific assumptions is re-
garded as deficient. To discover that a phenomenon is cultur-
ally bound is to suggest that the phenomenon has not as yet
been fully understood and that it is not yet possible to formu-
late a universal explanatory theory that achieves the desired
goals of being both parsimonious and highly general.
Another consequence of the present physical-science
model of explanation is that social psychology has tended to
privilege laboratory-based methods of inquiry and to be dis-
missive of what is perceived to be the inherent lack of
methodological control of cultural research. Skepticism sur-
rounds the issue of whether sufficient comparability can be
achieved in assessments made in different cultural contexts to
permit valid cross-cultural comparisons. Equally serious con-
cerns are raised that methodological weaknesses are inherent
in the qualitative methods that are frequently involved in